A Commemoration of the Cambodian Genocide Reveals Wounds That Will Never Heal » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

It is said that time heals all wounds.

This may be true of wounds caused by passions enflamed by broken or damaged human relationships. Yes, this adage is true. Time does heal these wounds.

But there are wounds of a magnitude that far transcend the fleeting pain we have all experienced on our personal journeys through life, and these wounds never heal.

Consider the catastrophic wounds inflicted upon millions of innocent people by the twin pillars of evil, fascism and socialism, that bloodied almost the entirety of the 20th century. These wounds are permanent, untreatable, and ubiquitous. (RELATED: The New Marxists and the Red Menace)

I learned this firsthand recently when I addressed a group of Cambodian-Americans who gathered in Long Beach, California, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Cambodian Genocide. Long Beach is home to the largest number of Cambodians of any city outside of Cambodia.

A little background helps to frame my participation in the event.

I have delivered a lecture titled “The Victims of Socialism” on over 30 college campuses and at student conferences over the past nine years, at events hosted by The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Young America’s Foundation, Turning Point USA, and The Lincoln Club. The lecture highlights the unimaginable death toll suffered by three countries (Russia, China, and Cambodia) at the hands of their socialist regimes. It is meant to counter the favorable view of socialism that is rampant at most of our colleges and universities. (RELATED: Teach Your Children Well — About Communism)

Recently, at one of these lectures, I met a young college student of Cambodian ancestry whose father was organizing the Cambodian Genocide memorial event in Long Beach. She extended the invitation to me to deliver a few words because she felt it was important that members of the Cambodian community, especially the younger ones, understand the evil nature of the socialist ideology that had brought such devastation and horror upon their mother country. And I accepted. (RELATED: The History of Communism Must Not Be Repeated)

On April 19, 2025, I delivered my brief speech to an audience of about 60 people, almost all of whom were Cambodians. Many in the audience were in Cambodia in April 1975 when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge gained control of the country, started the carnage and butchery carried out in the killing fields, and marched everyone who was not murdered to the collectives.

As I spoke, I could see the sobering impact my words were having on these survivors of the genocide and their children. Eyes glistened, and tissues dabbed away the tears. The audience was looking intently at me, but their minds were looking past me and drifting back 50 years to mental images of the Khmer Rouge atrocities that many of them had witnessed in person.

In the front row, a 60ish man sobbed silently and uncontrollably into his hands. Later, when members of the audience were asked to share their personal stories of those terrible times, his crying became loud and inconsolable. He could not bring himself to talk about his personal experience, which, as I found out later, was that when he was 10 years old, the Khmer Rouge executed his father in front of him. Fifty years on, his wounds were excruciating and unrelenting. Others in the audience that day surely suffered, albeit silently, from personal traumas from the genocide that will never heal.

I initially felt bad that my brief speech had evoked such visceral emotions in this man. It was not until later that I found out he does not speak English, and he did not understand a word I said. The mere act of his community gathering to commemorate and honor his countrymen who were murdered 50 years ago had set off his firestorm of emotions.

Yes, some wounds will never come close to healing. But these lingering, timeless wounds should at least provide a lesson for those who have not come to understand the inherent evil of socialism. But, as my young host at the Cambodian Genocide event understands, many young people fall sway to the siren song of this vile ideology, especially on our college campuses. Even young people of Cambodian ancestry, whose parents and grandparents were murdered by socialists, are unaware of the true nature of this vile ideology.

This awful history must be taught vigorously and accurately in our schools, much like we teach of the horrors of the Holocaust carried out by fascists.

We must also instill in our young people an appreciation for the rights and freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, or one day, as Ronald Reagan once said, “we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Those brave Cambodians in Long Beach experienced the worst that mankind can deliver. It was a privilege to be amongst them as they honored the memory of those murdered 50 years ago by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge thugs.

May their lived experience with socialist terror and repression help to prevent such a human travesty from ever happening again.

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